Bengaluru based group health insurance start-up, Plum, has raised INR 7 Crores in seed funding. The funding round was led by Incubate Fund with participation from Gemba Capital and Tracxn Labs along with angel investors including Abhijit Gupta and Ram Sahasranam of Praxify Health, Sudheendra Chilappagari of Belong.co, Nitin Jayakrishnan of Pando and Alvin Tse of Xiaomi.

"When we look at other countries like the US, we see that a high percentage of the population is covered under employer-provided health insurance. We believe that India too will move in that direction, where a significant portion of India's population will rely on employer-sponsored health insurance. With Plum, we want to enable every last company in India to provide a high-quality health cover to their employees, no matter how small or big they are. We want to be the de-facto platform for employee health insurance, initially in India, and later in other developing markets like SE Asia and Latam," said Abhishek Poddar, Co-founder & CEO, Plum.

The 2019-established start-up helps employers & employees with more flexibility, transparent pricing, and high-quality healthcare experience. Besides, it helps employees with improved health benefits including doctor consultations, health check-ups, fitness & yoga, mental wellness, nutrition and dental care.

"At Plum, we are imagining group health insurance products from ground-up. We have built underwriting and fraud detection rails with insurance companies that never ever existed. This has enabled us to offer pricing that may be up to 80 per cent cheaper than existing market pricing, to companies as small as 7 employees. At Plum, we are building a truly online insurance platform that covers frontend (distribution) and backend (pricing, carrier and compliances)," said Saurabh Arora, Co-founder and CTO, Plum.

"Health insurance is now becoming a “must-have” product in India, especially in the post-COVID world. It is an essential component for companies to attract talent. However, group health insurance is a very complicated product in nature and the entire customer process from buying to claiming is still very manual in India. So, there is a huge gap between insurance companies, employers, and employees. Plum is filling this gap by bringing transparency and efficiency through beautiful technology and product. Abhishek and Saurabh have a very clear vision which aligns with what we see as a future of health insurance in India," said Nao Murakami, Founder and General Partner at Incubate Fund India.

The group health insurance market in India, which is almost 50 per cent of the total health insurance market, is expected to grow to INR 100,000 crores by 2025. It has seen an annual growth of about 25 per cent in the last few years and is doubling every three years.